


beauté

by ingenious_spark



Series: nous faisons semblant [1]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil
Genre: Canon Era, Depression, Drug Use, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen or Pre-Slash, M/M, Opium, Recreational Drug Use, Self-Destructive Tendencies, Self-Harm, Transgender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-22
Updated: 2013-04-22
Packaged: 2017-12-09 04:58:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/770236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ingenious_spark/pseuds/ingenious_spark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He has never been handsome, or beautiful, but that doesn't matter. Except when it does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	beauté

**Author's Note:**

> for the love of god pay attention to the tags PLEASE.

Grantaire has never been handsome.

He’s thin as a rail, but not whipcord lean like Enjolras, who is built like a young Greek athlete, all gorgeous slender lines. Enjolras’ shoulders are just bare broad enough tapering to thin, almost girlishly-rounded hips. He’s tall, muscled as a runner, again the very picture of a beautiful young Greek athlete. His legs are long and his hands slender. He is masculine beauty personified, and Grantaire is consumed by jealousy and love, culminating in abject devotion.

No, Grantaire is thin as a galley-slave nearly; thin and narrow and not much to look at, ropey with muscle gained from kickboxing and stickfighting. His shoulders are nearly the same width as his hips, and he never quite stopped being gangly, on top of being barely of average height. He forgets to eat too often, drinks too much, has other vices on the side, and these render him thin in an unhealthy manner.

Grantaire has never been beautiful, either.

Not like Enjolras is beautiful. Enjolras had been carved from marble by the gods themselves, given sunshine for hair and the heavens themselves for eyes. Enjolras would be almost feminine in his beauty were it not for his voice, a deeper timbre than one might expect simply looking at him. Additionally, stubble graces his cheeks when he has worked feverishly through the night. He is the pinnacle of masculine beauty, and for that Grantaire hates him as equally as he loves him.

Grantaire is not beautiful. His mouth is too wide, curled perpetually in a self-loathing smile. His nose has been broken and poorly set, his teeth are crooked. His curls are perpetually matting, and the darkness of them makes his skin look sallow where it really just ought be pale. There are perpetual dark circles beneath his red-rimmed eyes, for he has ever been prey to insomnia. His blue eyes are dull, more gray than blue, whenever he chances to glance in mirrors.

_(He doesn’t own any mirrors anymore.)_

It’s more than just his lacking qualities of handsomeness or beauty that make Grantaire loathe himself.

It is his body, and the reason he left his family and never looked back. It is the fact that his cheeks will never darken with stubble, the fact that he must affect it with charcoal-dust. It is the fact that he has never in his life removed his shirt in the company of fellows, even when joining in a friendly kickboxing match.

It is the fact that Grantaire is most definitively a man, and yet his body betrays him. He has painstakingly kept it secret, the fact that though he be a man, his body is female. The only one who knows is little Gavroche, who literally _does not care_ about it, as long as Grantaire doesn’t stop letting the boy stay at his little apartment when he needs to.

It is occasionally a boon that Grantaire has so many vices. The thinness of his body means that his monthly cycle is irregular at best, and not frequent at all. _(He won’t admit it, but Grantaire doesn’t_ want _to be healthy for this very reason.)_ Additionally, his chest is very small, easy to bind down with a simple strap of linen when he’s this thin.

He’s obtained one of his rarer vices this day. Ten little opium pills sit in a little paper packet in his weskit as he hurries home. It is rarely he indulges this one, as he has seen the effects of its exquisitely addictive nature far too closely.

A mere half-hour later he has burned one of the pills in his white-porcelain-and-bamboo pipe over his little opium lamp, engaging in a staring contest with a large, blank canvas that he had primed the day before. He frowns contemplatively, feeling calm already. It is easier to detach himself like this, and with what Enjolras had said to him the previous evening, he needs it. He toes the box of paint out from beneath his bed, setting the lamp and pipe down on his broad window-sill.

He feels like he can paint again, breathing freer without the stain of Enjolras’ judgement in his lungs.

He finds a pallette, his turpentine and brushes.

He will forego the absinthe for the night, with the emotional liberation of opium sliding through his veins.

He reaches for his charcoal, and begins.

\-----

The meeting is wrapping up, and Enjolras is on edge. He has been all night, and it’s patently ridiculous.

He sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose and gives up.

“Has anyone seen Grantaire? It’s unlike him to miss meetings.” He says, rather than asking. Everyone just sort of looks between each other doubtfully, shaking heads. Courfeyrac looks as though he remembers something, looking about with an air of puzzlement.

“Gavroche hasn’t been in tonight either.” He notes, and everyone looks between each other again, before Courfeyrac and Combeferre exchange a long, meaningful look that Enjolras recognizes a split second too late.

“Why don’t you go to Grantaire’s apartment and check up on him?” Combeferre asks in an idle tone. Everyone else discreetly leaves, making it he and his two lieutenants alone in the back room of le Musain. Enjolras rubs fretfully at his temples. Grantaire always gives him a headache - the man could be so much more than he is, and he always refuses to see it, and the waste of potential always makes Enjolras feel a little like screaming. Combeferre levels him with a steady look.

“What you said to him the other evening was unnecessarily unkind, Enjolras, and you know it. You should at least attempt to make amends.” Enjolras winces, because that had been an argument that had spiralled out of hand unnecessarily, and he really does regret the things he said; well, more the way that Grantaire had taken them, ending up silent, drinking more than even _his_ usual, and leaving remarkably early.

He sighs, and concedes the point.

“Do you know his direction?” He asks, and Combeferre grants him a quiet smile as Courfeyrac hurries to write it down on a spare scrap of paper.

“If you see Gavroche, tell him he was missed,” the cheerful man instructs, and Enjolras tipps his head in acknowledgement, gathering up his coat and leaving.

Grantaire’s rooms are in a shabby part of town, the only light in the building a steady shine of lamps on the second floor - he checks the address and mounts the stairs. It is Grantaire’s room from which the light issues, and he knocks gently at the door. There is no answer, though he can hear movement. He knocks again, and finally tries the door-knob. He gains admittance, and quietly shuts the door behind him. Grantaire is indeed, there, seated at stool before an easel, naked from the waist-up.

Enjolras can see the knobs of the other man’s spine, and feels the first inkling of concern. Then he swivels to reach down into a box to retrieve a tube of paint, and Enjolras is stricken breathless.

It’s small, but obvious, the swell of a bosom that _should not be there_.

Grantaire is a woman.

His mind blanks out for a space of time, before he leans back against the door and simply watches. He had known, intellectually at least, that the other - that Grantaire is a painter, but he has never seen the other paint.

It is clearly his own loss. Grantaire in this state is rapture personified. Enjolras doubts that he- that she- that _Grantaire_ has registered anything that has happened in these rooms besides the change of light, perhaps, since the painting was begun. A rustle breaks him from his reverie. Gavroche is there, nestled carefully in Grantaire’s bedclothes. The child looks as if he is just waking, and his eyes widen as they dart betwixt Enjolras and Grantaire. He slips from the bedding, retrieving jacket and weskit from the bedstead, and slipping his feet into his shoes without bothering with the laces.

“Now as you’re here, you c’n take care of 'im.” The boy is blunt, but speaks lowly. “‘e’s not had a drop that I know of, but ‘e’s had six of these last I counted, so don’t give ‘im no more.” Gavroche presses a parchment packet to his hand, and he glances - _opium_ pills. His heart sinks. “Get ‘im to eat sommink when you can get ‘im to respond, I don’t think ‘e’s touched a bite in a day and a ‘alf or summat like that.” Now the boy pins him with a fierce look. “An’ don’t you dare judge 'im, 'e’s had a hard life, bein’ born with the wrong bits and pieces an’ havin’ to deal with that alone.” Enjolras nods faintly, still too stunned to really do anything, and Gavroche nods decisively, and slips out the door.

It’s only after he’s gone that Enjolras remembers he was supposed to convey Coufeyrac’s message to the boy.

He quietly investigates the cupboards, finding apples, hard cheese and bread and setting them aside for later.

He sits on the edge of the bed and watches again.

This side of Grantaire is alien to him. He is passionate, it is clear upon his thin face, and this is the passion Enjolras has always wanted him to direct to their meetings, this is the passion he has always known Grantaire capable of. It is clearly tempered by the opium, but Grantaire still _shines_ with inner fire.

He realizes that he hasn’t even glanced at what he’s painting, merely observing his being, and glances beyond.

His heart cracks within his breast.

It is, recognizably, Les Amis de l’ABC, though they are a cloud of indistinct figures climbing towards a light, and Enjolras is not so naive as to not recognize that he is in the lead, a shining figure clasping a red flag, cast in a halo of golden light and shedding it down upon his fellows.

And there, at the bottom of the chaos their friends climb over, not even trying and engulfed in green-tinged darkness, is Grantaire, a _caricature_ of what Enjolras knows him to be.

Is this really how he sees himself? How has Enjolras unwittingly contributed to this view? How has he unknowingly sabotaged one of his dearest friends? He is pensive.

Some small time later, Grantaire bends, dropping his brushes into a jar filled with some sort of liquid, and setting his pallette down upon the box that houses his paints. He stands and stretches, and Enjolras can count the ribs of his friend, so starkly they stand out against his flesh. He turns, and Enjolras can see in the lines of his body how Grantaire could have made an acceptably lovely woman. He cannot actually juxtapose that image upon his friend though, so intimately he does know the other. It would be folly to do so.

Grantaire freezes in his tracks when he sees Enjolras, his arms flying up to cover his chest. Enjolras blinks at him mildly, and finds his voice.

“I’ve been instructed to feed you.” He says, and stands to retrieve the small meal he’s scraped together. Grantaire merely blinks at him owlishly, not moving to take the proffered food. Enjolras sighs lightly, and sets it down on the bed before grasping Grantaire by the shoulders and pushing him to sit on the bed as well. He pretends not to notice the flinch he gets for that, but files it away as something to not actually do again, kneeling in front of Grantaire to make himself less threatening. He carefully unwraps Grantaire’s arms from about himself and presses the food into his hands.

“Eat, Grantaire. I can count your ribs, you’re so thin.” The admonishment is gentle, but it seems to be exactly what Grantaire needs, as he obeys thoughtlessly. Grantaire’s eyes are on him the whole while, bewildered. His posture is hunched over, defensive. Enjolras slowly moves so he is sitting on the bed too, a healthy amount of space between them.

Enjolras waits patiently until his friend is done eating, and smiles gently. Grantaire still seems to be anticipating a blow, so Enjolras makes his motions obvious and slow as he wraps an arm around Grantaire’s shoulders and tucks the other man into his side.

“Everything is fine, Grantaire. Sleep. We can talk in the morning if you so desire.” He says softly, and it hurts him to see Grantaire hesitate still. “I can go if you would like,” he offers, and suddenly small, rough, paint-smeared hands are tight around his hand.

“I think I may be dreaming,” the confession comes, and Enjolras smiles quietly. “Or the opium is making me hallucinate. It hasn’t ever done that before.” Grantaire’s voice is raspy, husky, and heartbreakingly, adorably bewildered. Enjolras moves slowly, helping Grantaire lie back on the bed, and at least he is no longer tense, merely confused. “If this is a dream it would not be too much -” he bites his lip, and Enjolras makes a soft, encouraging noise. “If you were to lie down and sleep with me for the night, I would be complete.” There is a raw vulnerability in Grantaire’s eyes, and Enjolras finally understands.

Grantaire loves him. This request he can grant. He says nothing, merely slips out of his clothes until he wears only his breeches, as Grantaire does, and complies to his heartfelt desire.

He will sleep beside his friend now, and in the morning they will sort matters out to their satisfaction.

Grantaire makes a soft, breakable sound and curls close, and Enjolras opens his arms to the other man, allowing him to nuzzle close.

They sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> tell me if you liked it and might be interested in more! Also, the opium thing is mentioned in canon, so it's Hugo's fault, not mine, and I really spent a ridiculous amount of time figuring out how you actually go about smoking opium so yeah. Go look up opium pipes and opium lamps if you're interested.


End file.
